Microsoft's Office Web Apps reviewed: should Google worry yet?

Microsoft has launched a web version of Office – and unlike Office, it's completely free if you have a Hotmail account. That's remarkable on a number of levels – it means that it's finally trying to fight Google on Google's turf … or that it's trying to defend its turf on the PC. Which is it, Microsoft?

To find out, I dived right in. Just as Google requires you to log in with a Google account, Microsoft needs you to have a Live.com account (a Hotmail account will do). Fine.

The normal document options are there: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

I began with the Word Web App.

But where Google lets you create a document and just start typing, Office Online insists that you first give the document a name.

(And not just any name: it can't include any of the magick Windows-killing characters such as \ or :, nor can it start with the magick Unix-killing .).

By default (and with no option), the documents are created in the .docx format, which older version of Office can't read directly, though you can get free translators.

Fine; start typing. That's the easy part; and in many ways the setup is just the same as Google Docs. Typing, typing, typing …

Next: across the top of the document are four tabs: File, Home (which you're in if you're editing), Insert and View.
Clicking Home gives a number of file-based options: open in Word, Save changes, Share the document with others, Properties [of the document], and then the also-rans: Give Feedback, Privacy [find out how it's protected], Terms of Use, Close. Now: have you noticed what's missing from that?

There's no option to upload a document – or, at this time, to download it (though that will come later in our adventure). At this moment in the process, you can't get your content from your computer to the cloud, or vice-versa.

Well, actually, you can – see later – but it's not done from "inside" any of the programs. Unlike Google, again, where you can upload a document into an existing one at any time, and you can download a document as soon as or even before you've saved it.

This is a classic example where Microsoft hasn't thought about the user interface. One feels it's so busy protecting the Office monopoly on desktops that it can't give you the best experience, or even the best cloud-based experience, in case you stop buying Office.

Now, in the process of trying out the app, I clicked on the "View" tab. A fresh annoyance: a dialog box saying that the changes to my document haven't been saved, so do I want to abandon them?

The first thing it doesn't do, in Word: save regularly. (Though it does do this in the PowerPoint version. As we'll see, this is typical of the inconsistencies across the setup.)

This is a mad question. I'm in the cloud. What if I'm on a train and I lose my connection? Does Microsoft really need an explicit "save" order? But you can't proceed without it. By contrast, Google Docs also has a "View" tab (which shows you a layout version of the page) but its autosave – invoked, one suspects, when you hit the button – means you can flip between the "Edit" and "View" tabs without thinking about it.

Then I noticed another tab: "open in Word". Clicked on it, in the hope of getting an instant download. But ah, no, to do that you have to be "running a supported version of Microsoft Word and a browser that supports opening files directly from the Office Web Apps".

The next thing to try: sharing the document. This is a process that can be done from inside the document with Google; in Office Web Apps, it's a whole different place altogether. (You get a warning that you've leaving the page, so do you want to save your changes? Sighing, you agree that you do, while wondering if they've really never heard of Autosave in Redmond. Or never tried Google Apps?)

The Edit Permissions tabs is rather neat – a slider from "some friends" to "friends" to "friends of friends" to "Everyone". Or you can specify people. Just as with Google, which enforces a Google account, your friends will need a Live.com account. But they're free, and mostly painless. However, you can't make a world-editable document – which can actually be useful (we used one to crowdsource Oracle and Sun's list of takeovers last year, for instance).

Having saved the document, you then get the option to download it to your computer – the left-hand sidebar in the "File" tab changes to include it.

This is, again, terrible design. Menus which don't have consistent contents are confusing to the user, because you don't know when a particular element is going to be there. (How should it be done? Have the "download document" option all the time, but either gray it out, or if someone invokes it before saving, prompt them to save or name the file.)

So I downloaded the file – which came down with the most remarkable name. Instead of being test document1.docx it was called "test document1.docx" – the quotes are there too. That's terrible, frankly. It wasn't called that when it started (because, you'll recall, I wasn't allowed to use any such extras in the filename).

I actually had to edit the filename (to remove the characters that would have been illegal in the cloud) before I could open it. Terrible piece of work, Microsoft.

So I turned to PowerPoint Web App, thinking that this would surely be awful. It turns out not to be the case: for a start, it saves automatically.

On seeing that, one's instant reaction is: "Why not do that in Word Web App too?" Possibly the answer is that these come from different programming teams – but the lack of a consistent UI in a product that needs to be impressive, because it's competing against something from Google that's already there and is plenty good enough, is bad.

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Again with PowerPoint Web App, there's the File/Home/Insert/View tabs. When you click on "File" you get told there's no save (but, Microsoft, why not just say "PowerPoint Web App saves your file regularly. Click to learn more" instead of making people go and read an explanation?). Still no Download option, you'll notice: again, you don't get that until you click on the View button. That, at least, is consistent – but it's stupid. Why do I need to stop editing, do a save and view my work in order to download it?

Then we come to the other problem with Skydrive and the Web Apps: they're not always the snappiest. I got to see a lot of the "Loading…" button. Fortunately, you can generally drive it along by simply reloading the web page. But again, given that this is a product in its earliest days, not in wide-scale adoption, is it really too hard to keep up with the user?

Uploading documents: It turns out that you can – just not from inside any of the apps. (There must be a mental partition in the Microsoft mind: you're either in the filesystem, or you're editing a document. But what if you're inside a document and you need to add in another document? Google lets you do this, a direct injection; Microsoft doesn't. You'd have to open one document, copy the text, close it, open the second document, and paste. More steps, but of course completely logical if you're used to a desktop model. Except we're not on the desktop any more.

Next up: Excel Web App. This actually worked quite neatly. I uploaded a spreadsheet from my desktop to the files area, and then opened it – though Office Web Apps complained it was in the "wrong" (I suspect Office 2007) format, and made a great play of converting it to a different one – which I suspect was .xlsx, as there's no obvious difference between them seen in a list. (Another mistake, Microsofties. You need to see the suffixes of files online if they're stored and have the same names.)

Excel Web App runs smoothly, and is actually the best implementation of these three: you don't get bothered about the difference between "editing" and "viewing", you can download a snapshot or the entire spreadsheet, and it autosaves. That's more like it. It's even quite fast. And while it doesn't have the (desktop) option of inserting a chart – unlike Google Docs, where you can – it's tolerably good. I got the impression that the expectation was that this would be the most-used of the three.

On balance, though, this product has a long way to go. If you saw this and didn't know the brand name, you'd say that this was a company which didn't really get the web: where's the embed code, so you can include a spreadsheet or presentation in another web page? You'd say that it hasn't picked up on autosaving, that it seems to have learnt little or nothing from Google's implementation, and that it must have been done in a terrible rush, since the user interface (UI) quirks stand out like a sore thumb; you could get used to them, but you'd have to adapt to them, rather than using a program that smoothly tried to get out of your way.

If someone then whipped off the sheet and said "Look – it's from Microsoft!" you might well say "oh, that explains it, then." I still find it amazing that with so many people, Microsoft can't get good UI designers. Or perhaps it can, but they're buried in layers of management too deep to effect change. That's a pity: Google needs some good competition in this space, like anyone. Office Web Apps aren't that, yet.

Office Web Apps from Microsoft

Pros: Free; works on range of browsers; supports wide range of functions, particularly in Excel. Can interact directly with newest version of Office.
Cons: Maddeningly and unnecessarily confusing and inconsistent UI; insists on saving in Office 2007 (.docx, xlsx, pptx) format; often slow; no charting option in Excel; no autosave in Word; no upload-into-file option; no "embed" function (to include a spreadsheet in a separate web page).
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